The Royalty Treatment

When veteran government auditor Bobby Maxwell learned oil giant Kerr McGee was not paying the $10 million he says it owed in oil royalties, he prepared an order to Kerr McGee to pay up. Making sure the government gets its money from energy companies was Maxwell's job in the Minerals Management Service (MMS), a division of the Department of the Interior. But Maxwell claims his bosses at the MMS quashed that order.

After filing a lawsuit under the False Claims Act, which protects and encourages whistleblowers, Maxwell lost his job. This week, NOW talks with Maxwell about the personal and professional price he says he paid in pursuit of fairness, and examines an industry under fire for keeping too much of the enormous revenue it makes for drilling on land and waters owned by us all. Are oil and gas companies being protected—and even feted—by the government agency charged with regulating them?

"I felt very strongly that the American taxpayers just had $10 million stolen out of their pocket," Maxwell tells NOW Senior Correspondent Maria Hinojosa. "And that that needed to be remedied."

The founder of the environmental news site grist.org, Chip Giller, talks to David Brancaccio about his group's use of humor to inspire environmental change.

"I think it's this almost Daily Show approach to the environment." Giller says. He also talks about his mentor Bill McKibben, an environmentalist was his babysitter years ago. "At his knee, I was learning about global warming," Giller says of McKibben, who founded the Step It Up global warming campaign.